


It’s the Middle of the Night

by butimaloneandfree



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst, Fire, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-25
Updated: 2019-09-25
Packaged: 2020-10-28 00:13:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20769290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butimaloneandfree/pseuds/butimaloneandfree
Summary: It’s the middle of the night, but somehow that always seems to be when the worst things happen.This is my first ever fic so... *shrug emoji*





	It’s the Middle of the Night

“It’s the middle of the night” Kara groans when she hears her phone beeping. She sleepily slaps at her bedside table, cautious even in her sleep to not slap too hard, to not bring the entire room down when she’s just trying to silence her alarm.

Why is her alarm going off? Why won’t it stop beeping, no matter how she taps the screen? She forces an eye open. Why does it sound so different?

_Why does it sound so different?_ Both eyes fly open. It’s not her alarm, it’s a watch.

And faster that even a Kryptonian would’ve thought possible, she’s awake and she’s dressed and she’s out her window, following the sound only she can hear, and she knows it’s just a simple beep but in her ears it echos with the screams of her loved ones every time she’s been too late, and this particular one sounds like Alex and the unimaginable.

The beeps grow louder and then she doesn’t need to follow them anymore because she can see smoke rising from a warehouse on the far side of town and she knows without turning on her coms that this is it; that somewhere in the middle of that inferno is her sister.

It’s the middle of the night, and Alex doesn’t deserve to be in a trashy warehouse on the dark side of town. She deserves to never worry about death until she’s seventy, eighty, four hundred maybe, why not five hundred years old, when they have the greatest scientific minds in the world at game night every Tuesday? She deserves to face death for the first time in her old age, surrounded by everyone she loves.

But she faces death every week and now Kara does too, each of them running headlong into danger because maybe it’ll mean, just this once, that the other doesn’t have to.

She doesn’t pause, doesn’t look before she flies, she just propels herself into the already broken window in the brick wall, breaking through at sixty miles per hour and skidding on the ember-ridden floorboards. The smoke is too thick to see through, the particles tiny enough to irritate even her eyes if she keeps them open too long, but she opens them anyways, navigating by x-ray vision, a dizzying challenge of trying to see the layers for what they are. The brick walls look like mirrors and glass and she can knock into one focusing on the one behind it. It’s like a fun house but there’s nothing funny.

“Alex!” She cries out. She can’t hear a heartbeat over the roar of the fire (it had better be because of the roar of the fire) and she’s just now realizing that the beeper watch stopped at some point before she launched herself in here, and her coms are melting into her ears so she takes them out altogether.

Now the soot is in her lungs, and it feels unfair that she can be so strong on the outside but her insides can still hurt. She still needs air like humans and if more people knew this, if more people thought of this, if more people realized she isn’t as strong as she tries so hard to make them believe, she’d bet that wherever everyone keeps getting kryptonite and moon dust and nth metal and red sun lamps would be dismayed to realize they were being out-priced by water and smoke and carbon monoxide and all the normal things that could bring her to her knees. She supposes she should be thankful that most of her enemies refuse to see her as anything close to human.

She forces herself to keep breathing anyways. She pushes through a wall, hoping it isn’t a supporting wall, hoping she isn’t about to bring the building down,

Why are you here, Alex her brain screams, her lungs scream. Why were you the first one in.

She knows the answer, it’s because it’s Alex and of course. She wouldn’t let anyone else take the risk, not even her fireproof little sister who she insisted needed more sleep.

Kara likes to think that she’d fight this hard for anyone. All lives are important, after all, but boy, if it wouldn’t be just a little bit easier, a little bit lighter, if she could be in here knowing that Alex was out there, waiting in a squad car or standing next to J’onn or even running ops from base.

She closes her eyes, lids burning as they meet the ash, and focuses. Beyond the crackle of the fire, her own increasingly raspy breaths, the shattering of a window.

“Help”

It’s faint, so faint she could’ve imagined it but she has to believe it’s there because she stands for hope and this is what hope feels like. She turns towards the noise, desperately searching through the walls and debris, and there. Finally.

Alex is two floors down and three rooms over for a total of five solid barriers between them and another three from the exit. And now Kara doesn’t care about supporting walls or the fact that the room is spinning or she’s already inhaled more smoke than any human could survive. She doesn’t even stop to consider concussions or whether a lack of oxygen could affect her like a lack of sunlight does. She flies straight through the wall, and then the floor, and then more walls and more floors and each one is just a little bit harder to get through but then she’s there, and Alex isn’t moving and there isn’t enough oxygen in the room but Kara can finally hear Alex’s heartbeat and it’s finally going to be okay.

Kara slows just enough to scoop Alex into her arms without any whiplash, and she can feel something wet on her forehead but she doesn’t have time to deal with that. Now it’s the same as before, but this time backwards, making sure her own shoulders, back, head, elbows take the brunt of the force as she crashes through walls and windows, pulling her cape around to shield Alex from the debris, and then they’re outside.

The cool night air feels perfect and Kara drifts down towards the street without really deciding to land or not. The world is still spinning and now her forehead is dripping which doesn’t make any sense but Alex is breathing and her heartbeat is getting stronger and through the coat of ash in her eyes, Kara can make out J’onnon the street below.

She lands hard, hard enough that she stumbles, and there’s a crack in the street under her. She didn’t realize the street was quite that close. And now there are voices but they seem so far away and then there’s a stretcher in front of her and she’s not sure when it got there, but she lowers Alex onto it and she can see from the calm movements of the med team that Alex is going to be okay.

The adrenaline is starting to wear off but she still can’t get enough air, no matter how hard she breathes and she touches her forehead and now her hand is red but she can’t figure out why it would be red, when Alex wasn’t bleeding. Someone’s shouting but it sounds like they’re on the other side of the world and the world’s still spinning so she sits down, and then she lays down and it’s easier to breathe with the night sky above her.

Somewhere in the back of her mind she knows there’s something wrong, but she can’t remember what. She’s not sure why she’s here, or why it’s dark, or why her lungs hurt and her head hurts and she’s pretty sure she was stressed but she’s not sure why. It seems like she’s always stressed, not always even for a reason she can think of. A nap might do her some good.

The mission-whatever it was- is accomplished. Otherwise she wouldn’t be laying down, Kara’s sure of that much. Supergirl doesn’t lay down on the job, but after is fair game. And even through the soot, she loves looking at the stars. She loves falling asleep looking at the stars; she and Alex used to do it all the time in Midvale.

She fingers her cape underneath her, so stiff and yet so soft. She always forgets it’s a baby blanket, but now it’s even more comfortable than the Danvers couch. Someone’s yelling but it’s not about Alex so Kara doesn’t care. She’s just fine laying her, working on breathing, clutching her cousin’s baby blanket. They’re still yelling and on second thought, maybe it is Alex doing the yelling, which is a relief because that means something’s back to normal when nothing is making sense. That sounds right to Kara. Alex should be telling someone orders, for whatever they’re up to right now.

It’s the middle of the night, and Kara stares at the stars, still trying to get enough lungfuls of air, until the blackness creeping on the edges of her vision close all the way in.

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn’t going to write a second chapter but then I realized the second chapter would basically be “you can’t just run after me into fire” “then don’t run into fire” and I’m a huge frozen sucker so...idk lmk what you think


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